Various polymer-based, solid support and/or porous matrix systems are in common use in molecular biology research, genetic analysis and diagnosis. In these systems, a biopolymer, such as a specific antibody or a nucleic acid for an antigen-antibody binding determination or a nucleic acid hybridization analysis, respectively, is used as an analytical probe and affixed, e.g., to a porous matrix which may be layered on a solid support. The material of a porous matrix commonly consists of a highly charged polymer such as nitrocellulose, activated nylon, polyvinyl difluoride (PVDF) or agarose beads as shown in Chin et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,197,599. In other such biopolymer probe systems used for microarray analysis, for example U.S. Pat. No. 5,744,305 (Fodor et al.), the probe of interest is chemically reacted with a solid surface and a biopolymer probe-binding matrix, such as nitrocellulose, is not required.
Such systems are used, e.g., to identify or isolate molecular species contained within a biological preparation to be characterized. The species of interest hybridizes or binds to the target biopolymer probes, which are provided in a solid support form, such as in a glass or plastic slide configuration.
Microarray technology is a recent application of hybridization based approaches to analysis of nucleic acids (DNA, cDNA, and RNA) in biological samples. This technology is basically a miniaturization of the well-known membrane hybridization technology introduced by Southern and others in the 1970's. In this technology, small volumes of different oligonucleotides or PCR-DNA or cDNA samples are spotted or synthesized on a membrane or a solid surface at very high densities to form a single microarray. Each spot within the array contains replicate copies of a single nucleic acid probe species (NAx, wherein x varies according to the base sequence composition of the nucleic acid) and the array consists of a multiplicity of spots encompassing a collection of different species (NAx1, NAx2, . . . ), each of which is in a known position in the spotted array. Such a microarray can be hybridized to an unknown nucleic acid sample to determine the degree of complementarily between the the individual nucleic acids in the unknown sample and the different, known nucleic acid species on the microarray.
Preparation of microarray systems of the prior art is a very labor intensive endeavor, however. It would be desirable to have additional ways to prepare such systems that would require fewer steps on the part of the end user and that would result in the reduction or elimination of process-related variability from laboratory to laboratory.